Seperating smartphones from stupidphones

Siemens cash haemorrhaging mobile phone division wasn’t exactly the darling of the industry when it was bought by BenQ last year, but the first three handsets from the new ‘BenQ-Siemens’ brand have nothing to be embarrassed about.

Most desirable is easily the EF81, a skinny clamshell which will inevitably draw comparisons with Motorola’s iconic RAZR. It is just 16mm thick yet boasts 3G connectivity and a 256k colour display.

The integrated camera is a hefty two megapixels, swivels and the external screen acts as its viewfinder. USB connectivity and a nice stainless steel keypad add further street cred and a microSD memory card slot compliments the 64MB of onboard memory. Multimedia isn’t too shabby either with support for AAC+, MP3, Mpeg4, RealVideo and H.263.